Texas climbers recount death-defying fall on Mount Rainier

Noelle Smith as she is pulled out of a crevasse where she was hanging by a rope after an accident involving four Texas climbers.
(Photo by Stacey Wren)
June 21, 2012

Noelle Smith as she is pulled out of a crevasse where she was hanging by a rope after an accident involving four Texas climbers.
(Photo by Stacey Wren)
June 21, 2012

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The Texans on the way down Mount Rainier, 30 minutes before their fall.
(Photo by Stacy Wren)
June 21, 2012

The Texans on the way down Mount Rainier, 30 minutes before their fall.
(Photo by Stacy Wren)
June 21, 2012

Image 3 of 3

Army Chinook over the top of four Texans being rescued on Mount Rainier
(by Claire Kultgen)
June 21, 2012

Army Chinook over the top of four Texans being rescued on Mount Rainier
(by Claire Kultgen)
June 21, 2012

Photo: Picasa

Texas climbers recount death-defying fall on Mount Rainier

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MOUNT RAINIER, Wash. - She was broken, bloodied, out of her mind with fear and dangling from a rope face-down in a seemingly bottomless crevasse on the side of a mountain. And she had no idea she was all that was keeping her fellow climbers from plunging down an icy glacier to their deaths.

Not long before, Noelle Smith, an 18-year-old from Dallas, and her three Texas climbing mates were euphoric, the first group of that day last summer to summit Washington state's Mount Rainier, an iconic 14,410-foot volcano in the Cascade Range.

They had trudged upward single file in the predawn darkness for six hours with their ice axes and heavy, spiked boots to reach the snow- and ice-filled crater ringing the mountain's top.

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They could see for 100 miles. The accomplishment left them teary-eyed. They snapped photos, exchanged high-fives, wolfed down candy bars.

Months before, they were largely strangers when Noelle's uncle, Stuart Smith, a Waco lawyer who had scaled Mount Everest and the highest peaks on each continent, recruited them for the climb. Now they were forged as a team.

At 10:40 a.m., they tied themselves together with an 80-foot safety rope, stepped off the summit and eased back down.

Leading the way was Ross VanDyke, a 32-year-old assistant admissions director at Baylor University who had spent two years preparing for the summit bid, climbing neighboring Mount St. Helens and Mount Hood.

Gingerly, step by step, he led the team down the Emmons Glacier. It was like walking on the side of a giant, ice-covered roof. Their hearts pounded. Their breaths shortened in the thin atmosphere. Rhythmically, one foot first and then the other, planting the handles of their axes in front of them as they went, and then repeating - one careful step after the other, in unison, tied to each other in a high-stakes, live-together-die-together bond.

Stacy Wren, 22, a recent Baylor graduate and avid trail runner, brought up the rear. She tried to plant her right boot on the slope. The teeth didn't bite into the ice. She twisted, began to fall and yelled. She went down, now in free fall, ripping the other climbers off the face, all of them tumbling helplessly to certain death.

VanDyke dived forward, tried to bury the head of his climbing axe into the ice, but it wasn't enough to stop the plunge. A back corner of the tool sliced into his lip.

It was happening. They were sliding out of control, flailing for traction as they plummeted down rock-hard ice.

"I thought of my wife, Hannah, and knew this was it. This is how I am going to die," VanDyke said. "I knew you can't tumble down to the bottom of this and live. There is no way. It was so fast."

"It was really scary, like sheer panic," Wren recalled. "Then everything changed. I remember thinking, 'I'm coming home, Lord.' I was kind of OK with it. In that moment, I wasn't scared at all."

There was screaming, there was fear. Then silence, and darkness.

---

Wren was the first to regain consciousness. She was on her back. Her sunglasses, still strapped to her head, were smeared with blood.

"I really didn't know where I was at first," she said. "I knew I was lying on snow and realized I was on the face of the mountain. There was no noise. It was really, really eerie."

She shoved a bare hand in her mouth to check if she still had all her teeth.

Her watch had been torn off, as had the light on her safety helmet. Her nostril was ripped open. She was dripping blood all over herself and the ice. She was tangled up in the rope with team leader Stuart Smith, who was lying face down at a contorted angle. His knees were twisted. He was silent. Wren thought he was dead.

"I just killed Stuart Smith," she said to herself. "I can't believe I just killed Stuart Smith."

Wren shouted at him, repeatedly pinched his skin. Smith moaned. He was still alive.

VanDyke was slowly regaining consciousness. The pain in his leg was excruciating. He thought he'd snapped his femur. He heard someone shouting from up over his right shoulder.

"Ross, Ross, Ross, are you alive?" It was Wren.

She, Smith and VanDyke were still tied together by the rope, but there was no sign of Noelle Smith.

There was confusion, but no panic. One wrong move and they would all be jerked back down the mountain. Something had stopped their slide down a face a mile wide and twice the height of the Empire State Building. But what?

Wren used her fingernails to claw her way back up the mountain, following a segment of rope.

At the end of it was Noelle Smith. She had plunged into a crevasse and was hanging upside down in an abyss, her body anchoring the others. Even if it was possible to pull her out, doing so could send them all down the mountain.

Noelle screamed.

"It was this horrible blood-curdling scream like someone is freaking out," Wren said. "She was thrashing all around and the harness was slipping further and further down her legs."

Smith's nose was broken. She'd fractured her skull and a vertebrae, and dislocated her hip, among other injuries. Her legs were numb. It appeared she was going into shock.

VanDyke had an iPhone in his backpack and gently pulled it out, so as not to drop it. There was no signal. He thought there might be if he could somehow climb higher, back up the ice.

He used his one good leg and an ice axe he had tied to his wrist to drag himself up to find it.

He called 911. The operator connected him to rangers at Mount Rainier National Park headquarters.

"My name is Ross VanDyke. I am in a team of four," he said. "We've been in an accident on Emmons Glacier."

Park rangers told him help was on the way. Claire Kultgen, a member of the team who had decided not to climb that day, was watching the others through binoculars from a base camp lower down the mountain. She saw them fall and had told the rangers stationed there.

It was 12:43 p.m. The temperature was dropping and the winds were picking up. The climbers felt hypothermia and frostbite setting in. Help was a few hours away at best.

Without it, they would not survive a night on this mountain.

---

Peter Ramos, a professional climbing guide from Montana who was on Rainier that day, saw the aftermath of the fall. He was the first to reach the stricken party.

Using extra rope and his expertise, he secured the climbers and began pulling Noelle Smith from the crevasse.

Two rangers were already on their way up the mountain, but even for experienced climbers in excellent physical shape, the trek would take hours.

Forty miles away at the Joint Base Lewis-McChord, a mission to turbocharge a rescue effort was underway.

David Bulger, an Army Reserve Chinook helicopter pilot, was preparing for a deployment to Afghanistan when he got the call to report to the hangar. He and fellow pilot Richard Bovey would soon power up the helicopter and pick up a crew of medics and rangers.

"We had to get up there and save lives," Bulger said.

It was 3:13 p.m., more than two hours after VanDyke's call, when the Chinook and its rescue team swooped in above the climbers.

VanDyke remembers thinking the helicopter looked more like a space ship than an Army workhorse. The giant twin rotors were spraying ice and snow in every direction, stinging like shards of glass as the pilots battled shifting winds - gusting to 50 mph - and the challenges of hovering off the high mountain's surface in dangerously thin air.

Park Ranger Nick Hall, a 33-year-old ex ex Marine sergeant and member of the elite mountain rescue unit, was first out of the Chinook, lowered on a cable through the swirling wind to the site of the accident. A native of Maine who crawled up rock faces when he was a child and thrived outdoors, Hall was one of the ranger crew's strongest climbers.

He was quiet, didn't waste time on small talk. But when needed, his voice could calm a crisis. He took charge.

Working with Ramos and other rescuers, Hall moved from climber to climber, evaluating their injuries, wrapping them with sleeping bags and "packaging" them to be hoisted into the Chinook and flown to Madigan Army Medical Center.

Noelle Smith, the most seriously injured, was the first to be hoisted up. The litter was then lowered for the second climber.

Nick Hall was standing on the slope, untethered, waiting for it. He snatched it and released it from the cable. The litter began sliding down the slope, buffeted by the wind and the rotor wash. Hall struggled to control it.

Ramos was lying over Stuart Smith, trying to protect him from the rotor wash. He remembers wondering how Hall was managing to stay on his feet. He felt something heavy hit his back, and then saw the helicopter veer away from the mountain.

Suddenly, it became silent. Ramos looked up.

Hall and the litter were gone.

"Nick, Nick are you there" a voice crackled over a radio.

It was 5:01 p.m.

---

From the Chinook, the crew watched Hall tumble backward down the mountain. He kicked at the ice frantically with his crampons as he tried to stop. He flipped and spun, head over heels, until he was lost in clouds and snow.

"OK, this just got real serious," Jon Bowman, another ranger who was lowered from the Chinook, radioed to the rescue command center.

The helicopter swept 2,400 feet down the mountain in an attempt to rescue Hall. A ranger was dropped near his inert body. He was asked if a medical evacuation was urgent.

"Not urgent at this time," he replied.

Hall was dead.

"My body began to hurt as I thought of him falling and bouncing through the terrain like a rag doll," Ramos said. "I can only hope he got knocked unconscious early in his fall."

The Texans were not aware that Hall had fallen, and no one was telling them.

By this time, the Chinook was low on fuel and, with Noelle Smith on board, returned to base.

At park headquarters, where Stefan Lofgren, the chief climbing ranger at Rainier, had assumed command of the rescue, there was confusion, anger, sadness, panic.

But there were still three climbers on the mountain who needed to be rescued. The mission wasn't over.

"We had to make some quick decisions on what the priorities were," Lofgren said. "We were assuming the weather was going to get worse."

The sun was dropping behind the mountain when the Chinook returned for one last rescue attempt. It was 7:37 p.m., and the pilots had one thing going for them. It was the summer solstice, the longest day of the year.

VanDyke was wrapped up like a mummy, praying to get aboard the chopper. He'll never forget hearing the click of his litter being connected to the Chinook's cable. The litter spun around and around in the wind, but he was hauled in safely. Next up came Stuart Smith.

Rod "Hot Rod" Boultinghouse, a civilian Army medic with more than 31 years of military experience, was on board the Chinook. It was bouncing around in the wind. He could appreciate the challenges the pilots were facing - one watching the instruments, the other looking at the perilously close slope of the mountain.

Hot Rod passed an oxygen mask back and forth between the climbers. It was freezing, and bumpy. The smell of fuel was nauseating.

"Stick with me. Stick with me," Boultinghouse told VanDyke.

Wren, the least injured of the climbers, was to be hoisted next, but the Chinook's pilots momentarily lost orientation and the helicopter dropped toward her and the rescuers. Wren was tackled by a ranger. He waved off the helicopter.

"Get out of here. Get out of here," he yelled in a panic into the radio.

"That was too close of a call for me," the ranger said over the radio. "You almost took our heads off with those rotors."

It was now 9:05 p.m. - too dark, too windy and too dangerous. The helicopter veered away and disappeared into the gloaming.

Wren had been seconds away from rescue. She could no longer feel her fingers and toes. And now she was going to spend the night on what had become an ice-covered monster.

Two rangers would stay with her using a tent and sleeping bags given to them by Ramos and his climbing partner.

Wren still had no idea that Hall had died, that he would be keeping her company that night on the mountain, buried in a blanket of snow.

---

The clouds were low the next day, the snow creating a "white out," and Wren could barely see past her boots.

There would be no helicopter rescue. Accompanied by the rangers who spent the night on the icy mountain with her, Wren would have to climb back down.

At times, they trudged through knee-deep snow; at others they teetered on steep slopes of ice.

She was terrified of falling, haunted by visions of Noelle Smith dangling on a rope upside down in a crevasse.

"I was so tired and cold. I was done," Wren said. "I just wanted to die."

She asked the rangers if they would dig a hole and leave her behind.

"This is the point when you have to reach down inside yourself and figure out what you are made of," one of them told her. "You have got to pull it together."

Hours later, Wren took her final steps off the mountain. She was filthy and caked with dried blood. The rangers had told her Hall was dead, and the world was watching the story.

Her family was waiting at the park headquarters.

"My mom screamed and hit the ground sobbing," she said. "She just collapsed."

A year after the accident, the events of June 21, 2012, are with her each day as she carries on with life. She owes an unpayable debt to a Hall, a man she never knew, as well as the two men who kept her safe that long frozen night.

"I think about it every day, but I don't think I'm traumatized by it anymore," Wren said. She still has the physical reminder, a large scar left by the harness when she came to a crashing halt. Her toenails - lost in the ordeal - have grown back, as has the skin on her fingertips.

Noelle Smith, now in college, is determined to return to the Cascade Range, maybe even Rainier. She is inspired by Hall, who lived and died doing what he loved.

"I want to do something I love, and be content with where my life is," she said. "You never know where it is going to end."

Her uncle, team leader Stuart Smith, declined to publicly discuss the climb. He and Noelle have spoken. He told her it is important to learn from the accident.

VanDyke, though, is still up on the mountain in many ways.

He apologizes for everything, even if no one says he did anything wrong. He's thought countless times of how things could have turned out differently - for better or for worse.

"I go through the conversation every day as to why I am still here," he said.

He sold his pricey climbing boots and donated the money to the church. He never again wants to be responsible for lives of others in an unforgiving environment that demands he be perfect when he is not.

He sent a letter to Hall's parents in Maine but has no idea if they got it. He keeps his Rainier climbing pass in his wallet, but he has no intention of climbing again.

"I don't eat cereal, don't eat broccoli or see a movie the same way," he said.

He watched a memorial for Hall that was streamed online while Hall's body was still up on Rainier and wouldn't be recovered for days due to bad weather.

"One of the things that kills me - knowing that Nick was somebody's friend, that he was somebody's son, that he was somebody's brother.

"How do you say, 'Thank you and I'm sorry' to the family?'

"If we had not been on the mountain that day, their son would still be here."